


Two Rivers, Two Springs

by maracolleenbanks



Category: Dreamwalkers Universe
Genre: Gen, Gods, Ouroboros (Dreamwalkers)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-11
Updated: 2018-08-11
Packaged: 2019-06-25 15:30:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15643638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maracolleenbanks/pseuds/maracolleenbanks





	Two Rivers, Two Springs

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dreamwalkers Universe](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/405618) by Siren Tycho and Mara Colleen Banks. 



I really started to become a person three months after I was made. I had the body of a woman and the mind and maturity of an adult in most things, but while Poseidon made me with most of the developmental stages of childhood integrated inside me, there are some things even the most skilled artificer can’t build into a construct. There are growing times a living sentient consciousness can’t skip.

On the day when he put his maker’s mark on me and called me complete, I had just enough energy to allow myself to be carried and plopped onto a chair for a once-over. He knelt in front of me and took the heels of my feet in his hands, stretching my legs out and examining my knees, admiring his own workmanship and the skill with which he’d been able to carve them in the end. There are challenges in every making, and my knees had been his challenge with me. 

Pleased with himself, he looked into my eyes, and I reached out my arms for another hug. That was as much newness and stimulation as I could stand. I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder, and he carried me to bed. 

 

For most of those first three months I slept, and I have few memories of that time. Most of them involve waking up and opening my eyes on the log wall of the cabin. He watched me always. As soon as I showed signs of consciousness, he appeared, usually with a cup of something hot to drink in his hand. He held the cup for me as I drank, at first, but it was only a few days before I insisted on sitting up, so I could hold the cup for myself. He sat with me after I drank, silently stroking my hair, until I fell asleep again. 

If he ever wished that I would wake up and stay awake, he never communicated to me in those early days. His patience seemed unbounded until the day my patience ran out, and I sat up in bed, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and refused the drink he offered me. 

I was new, but I wasn’t stupid. I had gone through the cycles of sleeping and waking often enough already to know that his drinks weren’t just comforting. There was some medicinal substance in them that made me sleep more and deeply. 

I had no intention of sleeping again, and I made that clear. Only when he was sure he couldn’t convince me to go back to sleep did he smile, a wide grin that communicated as clearly as if he had said it with words that he had been waiting eagerly for this moment. He swept me up into his arms and twirled me around and gently put my feet on the floor next to the bed, careful not to put very much weight on my legs until my knees tensed to carry my weight. He made me strong, and I was able to skip the time babies spend on strength training before they’re able to walk, but everything about walking was new. I clung to his elbows for a few turns around the cabin until I felt confident enough to propel myself around the place under my own steam. 

I was determined to never sleep again, and I kept walking and skipping and dancing around the cabin until I almost fell asleep on my feet. In not very much time at all, I was once again falling into his arms, carried off to sleep and dream and process this innovation called walking. 

 

I slept a lot after my first real waking but not continually. Each time I woke up, there was something new to see or do. There was enough to keep a new construct fascinated in the cabin for a long time, and it never occurred to me to wonder about the world outside the house. Part of this was his doing. The universe in which the cabin existed was one of his own design, a work of art intended to communicate the timelessness of the sea as expressed by woods. Snow fell on the other side of the cabin’s one window, and it felt as if the world beyond the cabin was just a picture, made to manufacture of feeling of coziness inside the cabin and nothing more. 

If I had been older, it might have occurred to me to question this story when he appeared on my waking with a long white dress instead of the usual cup of tea. Instead, I assumed this was one more new thing to experience and was shocked when he opened the door and called me to follow him outside.

The woods around his cabin were silent. There were no animals or birds. Snow fell heavily, covering the branches of the evergreen trees beyond the clearing as it always did. At that rate, the cabin should have been buried in drifts. That it wasn’t was part of the timelessness of the place.

I stepped out into the snow in my bare feet and recoiled from the cold. He chuckled and dreamed a pair of shoes onto my feet, and I tested the cold stuff gingerly again. Finding that it wasn’t very cold through the shoes nor very deep, I took a step toward him. Then I looked behind me, wondering at my own footprints. 

I was soon absorbed in figuring out a dance that made the prettiest pattern of footprints in the snow, and he went back in the house. 

The swish of the dress around my legs and the crunch of the snow under my feet enchanted me. I would have been stunned by the sudden appearance of a roaring ship hovering over the house no matter what I was doing, but the shock of being torn out of my trance by the sudden noise and wind and the shadow and gleaming, hulking body of metal sent me tearing into the house. 

I would have hidden under the bed, if there had been enough space. Instead, I cowered in the space between the bed and the wall while Poseidon talked to me in soothing tones until the ship landed, and the engines turned off, and my undying curiosity drew me to the window to see what noisy thing was bringing about the end of the world. 

The ship was silvery white, a bit like a cross between one of your airplanes and a space shuttle. A man leaned on the side of it who seemed to be that same indeterminate age as my maker. His red hair gleamed like fire in the dark, snowy woods. Jumpsuits are nearly universal among pilots in Dream, and he was wearing one that was either orange or blue. In my memories, it’s both.

He grinned and waved when my face appeared in the window, and I looked to Poseidon quizzically. 

“You should wave back,” he said.

I smiled back and waved. “Who is that?” 

“My friend Odin,” he said. 

Poseidon talked about Odin constantly, practically from the moment I was awake enough for conversation. They had been partners running Venus and would be partners running Ouroboros when I was ready. I would have a role there, too, but I didn’t know what it was yet.

He left to greet his friend and didn’t wait for me to follow. They greeted each other with slapping hugs. When Poseidon relayed what had happened inside, Odin laughed with a roar like engines.

“I’ve come to show you the clock,” Odin called out to me. 

“What is the clock?” I called back.

“Home,” Poseidon said. 

 

If there was ever an opposite to the cozy cabin where I was made, Odin’s ship was it. Inside it was mostly bare metal except for the cockpit and benches along the walls with leather seats. Poseidon sat with me on one of the benches as Odin turned dials and pulled levers and the ship took off. 

I started to shake when the engines started, and he pulled me into a tight hug. 

“It will be quieter once we’re out of the world,” he said. 

”How can we—“

“You’ll see.” 

I watched out the window across from us as we seemed to climb the trees, higher and higher, until their tips disappeared below us. I started to jump toward the window to see where they had gone, but Poseidon grabbed me by the hips and pulled me back down. 

“It’s better for us to be sitting for this part,” he said. 

To this day, I don’t know why. We left the world with no more than a snip and a pop. In an instant, day became night, and then we were floating in silence through the blackness of space. 

He took his hands off my hips. “Now you can go.” 

Outside was a glowing blue sphere covered with green patches and ice at the poles. We were far enough away that I could see no signs of life, but the planet nearly filled the window. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said. 

“It’s Earth,” Odin said, “or one of them. There are thousands of them out there. This one is one of my favorites, but don’t tell anyone. The three of us aren’t supposed to have favorites.”

“When do I get to see the clock?” I asked. 

“You’re in the clock,” Odin said. “Earth is one of its gears.”

He dreamed a vision of a ring surrounding nine planets and a burning star and placed it into the air in front of me. The planets turned in their orbits. A tiny little rock at the center whipped around at impossible speeds, so fast I could barely make out its form. Each planet further from the sun orbited more slowly until the last, a tiny, rocky world after a series of giant glowing spheres, seemed to barely move at all. 

“This is the one you’re looking at,” Odin said, pointing to the third planet from the sun, and then he pointed to the ring. “This is home.”

“Why is it called a clock?” I asked. 

“Because the orbits of the planets are a way of marking time,” Odin said. “The one you’re looking at there is in somewhat of a privileged position. It’s the home world, and some of the ways in which time is measured in the clock are from the perspective of Earth, retrogrades and so forth, but you don’t need to know about that now. Some people say that humanity originally evolved on an Earth.” 

“Do you think they did?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “There’s no way of knowing for sure, but everyone I’ve ever known who’s visited an Earth has said that it’s felt like going home.”

“When will I get to visit?” I asked.

“Now, if you want to,” he said, exchanging smiles with Poseidon.

 

Poseidon stayed behind on the ship. I whimpered, at first, when he said that he wouldn’t come down to Earth with us, but he promised he would watch.

“Anyway, heart,” he said, “time won’t pass at all for me while you’re gone. You’ll step out and back in an instant.”

“I’ll still be gone from you, though,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “but you’ll be having so much fun, you won’t notice.”

I looked at him doubtfully, but he gave me a smile that said, “Be brave,” and I stood up a little straighter. 

I had dreamwalked a little already. Poseidon had taught me to close my eyes and envision myself on the other side of the cabin until I found myself standing where I imagined, but that was nothing to stepping out of a ship in the air and down onto a planet I had never visited before. 

It is impossible to dreamwalk to a place you can’t imagine, so Odin spent a long time describing our destination to me. We were going to a mountain top with rocks and snow and sides covered with evergreen trees. At the foot of the mountain was a deep blue river that snaked in an S shape until it reached the sea in a wide mouth. The mountain was tall, almost up into the clouds, and steep. When he decided that I had enough detail to step off, he wrapped his arms around my waist, half so that we would end up in the same place, and half so that I wouldn’t lose my balance and fall down the mountain when we got there.

His caution, I found when we landed, was not unfounded. We landed facing down the mountain, and my ankles were flexed so much to take the incline I felt like I was standing on tiptoe. He pulled me up onto a flat rock, and we looked down together on a landscape that, to my cabin-trained eyes, seemed to go on forever. The evergreen forest terminated at the base of the mountain and gradually transitioned into a deciduous forest in fall. A riot of warm colors covered hills whose rolling was almost imperceptible from our altitude, following the curve of the river and ending there. On the other side of the river flat brown plains, speckled with the running shadows of great herds of horses, went on until they disappeared in a haze.

The air was thin, and it is hard to tell, in retrospect, if my breath caught in my chest with awe or lack of oxygen. 

Eventually, Odin nudged me away from the scene and toward a shadow in the rock. Up close, it revealed itself to be a cave. 

“There are places inside we’ll have to go on hands and knees,” he said. “I’ll go in first. It’s not big enough for two to go abreast. I guess we’re about to find out if you’re claustrophobic.” 

The entrance was tall enough for us to enter standing, but it narrowed and shrank quickly, and my palms and dress were quickly covered in mud. The light disappeared quickly, and Odin paused to allow me to experience it before he dreamed a ball of light and stuck it on top of my head. I had been through dozens of nights, and I thought I understood darkness, but the darkness of the cave was of a different kind. It was more than absolute. Its presence made me feel, in a way I had not been able to feel standing tall on the mountain’s flank, the aliveness of the mountain. I really felt like we were inside the body of the mountain and illuminating its insides.

When it felt like we had crawled halfway through the mountain, the narrow passage opened into a great yawning room, many times bigger than the cabin. Rivulets of stone ran down the walls and made it look like the mountain was melting from the inside. The appearance of stone in motion was so real, I was convinced the mountain was about to splash down on my head until Odin put his hand to the wall and water flowed over his hands. 

“The water carries bits of stone with it as it flows, wearing away the stone here and building it up there until it’s sculpted the rock in its own image over millions of years,” he said. “Most people think of big waves and rivers running in torrents when they think of the power of water, but it’s that quiet power that slowly moves you I really admire about watery people like you.”

“You’re airy,” I said. “Sky. What is that like?” 

“Like this,” he said, playfully blowing at the hair that had fallen out of its braid and into my eyes. 

I giggled, uncomprehending. “That tickles.” 

“That’s what air does to you,” he said. “It tickles your mind. Air is fast, fast as a thought, and clever and blows where it will.”

“While water flows down,” I said. 

“Not always,” he said. “You’ve not seen your maker worked up into a froth yet, and if you get up enough pressure…”

He reached his hand into the stream flowing down the walls and splashed me. I saw it coming and ducked but not quickly enough. Tiny drops of water landed on my face, and I squealed at the coldness. 

“Come,” he said, holding out his hand for mine. “There’s one more thing I have to show you.”

The narrow passage continued on in the other side of the cavern, narrow from the beginning, as if someone had cut the passage in half at the cavern and placed it at either end. It continued to shrink as we walked until I couldn’t continue on hands and knees and had to wiggle along on my belly after Odin. 

I couldn’t have continued going that way for long, but I didn’t need to. After a few feet, I saw light that came from a source that wasn’t the light on my head, and it was soon flooding the passage . I emerged, thoroughly covered in mud, into a tiny room with a pool of water set in a round basin. There was a hole in the roof of the cave, exactly over the basin. The basin was exactly the same size as the beam of light that came down from the roof. The water in the basin perfectly reflecting the sky and clouds, except on the edge where the water escaped over the side. This tiny trickle was the only sign that this was a spring and not a pool, and the water was moving. 

“Do you remember the river we saw out there?” Odin asked. 

I nodded, and he nodded toward the pool. 

“From here?” I asked. “This is the source of that?”

“Where does all that water come from?” I asked, looking up.

It was easy to imagine rain falling in a column into the cave, filling the basin.

“It rains here most nights they tell me,” he said, “but that would just fill the basin and make it overflow as long as the rain was falling. To get continual flow like this you need volcanism, pressure deep in the heart of the mountain, forcing the water to rise, even if it’s only enough to raise it to a trickle. That river is mostly glacier fed, it’s true, but its source is here—in earth and in fire.”

“And in air,” I said. “Sky, reflected in the pool.” 

He smiled broadly at this, and a small breeze descended into the tunnel and rippled the water. The wind’s gesture echoed the one Odin had made blowing my hair out of my face in the cave, and I shivered with sympathy. Or was it sympathy? The wind blew again, and I once again felt chills. 

“Are you doing that?” I asked. 

“I might be,” he said. “Why don’t you find out?” 

He nodded at the pool, and I knew what he meant. I was of water. I knew I was from the first moments of my consciousness. It’s not that there was a part of me that was water. I was water the way I was human. In human form, it was like that part of me was locked away, dark and hidden like the mountain’s insides. I knew instinctually that to see as the water saw, I would have to turn inside out. 

Odin stepped back to give me space, more emotional than physical. I put my hands in the pool, splashing water over the sides. The water was warm, warmer even than I’d expected from its sitting in the sun. It rushed hot, scalding from a tiny hole on the bottom, that was quickly overwhelmed and cooled by the rest of the water. I found the source’s twin in my heart, the place of constant upwelling in the center of my chest, and as the twin springs began to flow together, my body melted into water that filled the pool and overflowed, hovering in the flow like a fish, without flowing on.

I looked up through the hole in the roof, and I saw Odin as the sky gathering clouds, sucking up moisture from the snowy mountains into darkening drifts. His wind like fingers brushed my face, and I shivered in ripples. 

The light from the natural skylight was nearly extinguished by the gathering storm, and then it began to rain. Bliss, like being made anew. The spring flowed over in a torrent, and I held myself steady in the rush, allowing it to flow through me and down, down to the river below. I did not yet have the strength to send my consciousness down the mountain to the sea with the water, taking in the whole length of the river in my being. In that moment, I was just a spring meeting the sky, filled with rain. 

The storm ended, and Odin dreamwalked into the mist and rematerialized as a man in the cave. I readied to follow him back to human form, but something in his face stopped me. He stepped toward the pool and put his cupped hand in the water, penetrating the surface just enough to fill his palm with water. 

He put his hand to his lips and drank.

“Sweet,” he said. “Now let’s dreamwalk you back to your maker while there’s some chance of an inch of that dress still being the way he made it.”


End file.
